On Consolation

Illuminating and moving, these wide-ranging portraits of men and women seeking answers in dark times - from the Book of Job to Montaigne, from Cicero to Akhmatova, and on to today's palliative care - appeal to us all, as a universal quest and an intimate personal testament.Jenny Uglow, author of Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense

An extraordinary meditation on loss and mortality - drawing on all of Michael Ignatieff’s powers as a philosopher, a historian, a politician and a man. His portraits of figures such as Hume and Montaigne are sharp and dignified, troubling and consoling, thoughtful and deeply humane.Rory Stewart, author of The Places in Between

Reading this book is like taking a walk along a winding path with a dear friend and sharing life’s travails. But the friend keeps metamorphosing - into Montaigne or Marx or Mahler, Anna Akhmatova or Albert Camus. At the end, you feel enlivened, fortified, and somehow just a little wiser. This is a bold, brilliant, and yes, moving book.Lisa Appignanesi, author of Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love

In an age when we are so much in need of solace, Michael Ignatieff went looking for it in texts and times whose assumptions are profoundly different from our own. The result is a secular reinterpretation of a landscape that has often seemed visible only through a religious lens: it is elegant, humane and intensely rewarding.Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity